This invention relates to tactile and movement sensation generation, and more particularly to tactile and movement sensation generation for home theatre and/or motor simulation systems.
A century ago, the first movies did not include sound. The first sound tracks were music mimicking the action. A few inventions later, the spectator was finally able to hear at least the voice of the actors. From this point, improvements made the correlation between the sound track and the movie track more and more reliable. But viewers wanted more. The quest for realistic entertainment was beginning. A new need arose, mechanical sensations that would stimulate more deeply the senses of the users.
Unfortunately, providing a mechanical sensation to a viewer is not an easy task. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,874,162, Trumbull et al describe a motion picture amusement ride. This motion picture amusement ride works either in a manual mode or in an automatic mode. In the automatic mode, movements of each actuators are encoded on a tape cartridge which is synchronized with the movie. The apparatus described in this patent has a large size and it is therefore not convenient for a home theatre. Furthermore, in case of personal use, an individual may want to jump from one movie sequence to another, this may cause de-synchronization, as no specific synchronization scheme is described, which is fatal for the entertainment.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,849, Hollingsworth, III et al describe a point-of-view motion simulator. As in the previous patent, the system described is not convenient for personal use. The synchronization is achieved using a single channel (the sixth channel) which provides a continuous stream of pulses which acts as start or sync signal. If synchronization may be obtained while playing the movie from the beginning to the end, the synchronization may be hard to maintain when a user wants to jump from a movie sequence to another. Finally, this approach by its core synchronization mechanism wastes an entire channel that will not be available anymore to the user. More fundamentally, the movie track may be altered in order to be used with this invention.
Therefore there is a need for a method and apparatus to provide motion sensations for a spectator watching a movie sequence without de-synchronization issues.
It is an object of the present invention to provide time stamps using an incoming data stream of information.
It is an object of the present invention to synchronize an effect with a data stream.
It is another object of the present invention to provide motion effects for a video track or a sound track.
Yet another object of the present invention is to create motion effects for a sound track or a movie track.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus to store and retrieve efficiently motion effects that may be played with respect to a sound track or video track.
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided an apparatus for generating motion effects for at least one actuator using an audio/video source stream signal, the apparatus comprising a track analyzer receiving the stream signal and performing a track analysis of the stream signal to produce a time variable characteristic signal, an effect generator receiving the time variable characteristic signal and generating at least one effect according to at least one rule, and a movement generator receiving the at least one effect and compiling the at least one effect to provide a single signal to each of the at least one actuator.
According to another aspect of the invention, there is provided a method for generating motion effects using at least one actuator with respect to an audio/video source, the method comprising the steps of receiving a signal from the audio/video source, analyzing the signal to generate a second signal, using the second signal and a rule to provide at least one effect; and compiling the second signal in order to provide a third signal to each of the at least one actuator according to said at least one effect.
According to another aspect of the invention, there is provided a method for providing haptic and motion sensations to at least one viewer in a simulator environment, the method comprising the steps of providing at least three actuators supporting at least one seat for the viewer, the actuators being adapted to move the seat and the viewer with small amplitudes at a frequency representing mechanical vibration, generating a vibration signal representing a level of vibration in the seat corresponding to a level of vibration associated with a virtual environment at each point in time, generating a visual cue signal representing a reciprocal visual cue movement in the seat corresponding to motion in the virtual environment at each point in time, converting the vibration signal into a first actuator position value for all of the actuators, converting the visual cue signal into second actuator position values for the actuators for causing at least a tilt in the seat, combining the first position value and the second position values to obtain an activation control value for each of the actuators, and supplying the control value to the actuators in real time.